DNA Themes

At the start of Dennis Kelly’s DNA, a group of teenagers at a school in London have already committed a heinous—albeit accidental—crime against one of their own. As the play unfolds, Kelly puts his characters in a pressure cooker, placing them at crossroads which force them, time and time again, to choose between right and wrong. The core group of teens overwhelmingly makes immoral and selfish decisions, and Kelly ultimately uses the play to…

Bullying, peer pressure, and the destabilizing effects of groupthink are at the core of Dennis Kelly’s DNA. Over the course of the play, Kelly examines a group of particularly cruel, emotionally detached teens—save for a few kind, empathetic members—and puts on full display the ways in which they cajole, coerce, and threaten one another. Ultimately, Kelly shows that bullying is an epidemic—and argues that the effects of peer pressure and conformist groupthink lead to…

Though Dennis Kelly’s DNA is a fairly straightforward narrative about a group of students who accidentally commit an unspeakable crime, there is also a deeper layer to the play: one which questions the nature of reality and investigates the difference between subjective and objective truth. Throughout the play, Kelly suggests that one’s experience of reality is something individualized and totally subjective based on one’s perceptions of the truth—and that reality can be manipulated to one’s…